Winter Sunset

It was mostly a day spent at home, chillin' with the bunny. My husband has been feeding our wild rabbits, and on this morning, the rabbit ate every slice of the carrot he gave it, then sat along the sunny edge of the yard and napped all day. Let me tell you that things are placid when rabbits are sleeping nearby.

My husband made a wonderful roast, and the house smelled amazing. But we were gearing up for the evening's entertainment, which would be the Super Bowl, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. We didn't have an iron in that fire, so we were able to watch and enjoy the show and snack freely without a lot of stress.

We had a fabulous pink and purple sunset just before we turned the TV on, and I ran outside into the back yard with my camera. The sunset lingered, and changed, and morphed, for about another half-hour. It was really something.

And as the game started, this country guy sang the National Anthem and made us all cry. Tiny Tiger was waving his flag madly around and I had tears running down my face. Maybe you did too. So my soundtrack song for this winter sunset is Chris Stapleton, nailing the Star-Spangled Banner, our national anthem.

Now, I can't seem to get out of here without telling a story. And since Kansas City won the Super Bowl, let's make it a Kansas City story. So I was in Kansas City the first week of May back in 1999 for an intellectual property conference. I flew out and back by myself, and stayed in a hotel right next to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is just fabulous and has a big shuttlecock out front.

I visited that museum every single day that I was there and took many pictures. I was using the Pentax K-1000 back then. And the one day that I was there, I went to my conference, and then in the evening I went out walking around, with camera.

Well, when I got back to my hotel room, there were tornado warnings on the TV, with twisters actually ON the ground; and they said that it might be a good idea for you to get in the bathtub for safety if any twisters should come too close. (How close is too close?) I, a central PA girl, was convinced I was going to die in some hotel bathtub in the midwest!

But I did not die. The closest tornado came within 40 miles of where I was staying. The history books call it "an unprecedented outbreak" for the afternoon of May 3, 1999, and all of the newspapers the next morning had a page 1 photo of the devastation caused by the F5 spawned by that set of cells that plowed through Oklahoma City. From a news report, here is the tale of the May 3 twisters:

A total of 74 tornadoes touched down across the two states [Oklahoma and Kansas] in less than 21 hours. At one point, there were as many as four tornadoes reported on the ground at the same time. The strongest tornado, rated a maximum F-5 on the Fujita Tornado Scale, tracked for nearly an hour and a half along a 38-mile path from Chickasha through south Oklahoma City and the suburbs of Bridge Creek, Newcastle, Moore, Midwest City and Del City. As the skies cleared, the states counted 46 dead and 800 injured, more than 8000 homes damaged or destroyed, and total property damage of nearly $1.5 billion.

First thing the next morning, the phone in my hotel room rang, and it was my big sister Barb. She always read the newspaper early in the morning, and she had seen the pictures of Oklahoma City's F5 tornado.

She couldn't remember which "City" I had gone to (it was Kansas, not Oklahoma, big sis), and she waited until a reasonable hour (that girl was usually up by 4 in the morning) to call and make sure I was still alive. Well, I can assure you that THAT was a happy phone call!

And that is the absolutely TRUE tall tale of how I outran twisters at an intellectual property conference in the midwest!!! Turns out I've got to have a soundtrack for THAT too, so here is the song Kansas City, from Oklahoma. What next? What next! Everything's up to date in Kansas City. . . .

Bonus links:

Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked from Worst to Best by Rolling Stone. (Of COURSE, number one was Prince!)

Super Bowl ASL Interpreter Justina Miles Goes Viral. (A story that warmed the cockles of the heart of this former Manager of Access.)